Wannabe Web Developer?

Everybody starts sometimes. Nobody was born wise and experienced. Maybe, some of you would like to know how to begin with web development. And those of you this short post is for. You’ll find here some suggestions, tips and navigation which way to go to become a web developer from scratch.

First, you should clarify WHO exactly you would like to be. Web application development has phases, which are sometimes done by one person only, but usually by a team. Why? It’s better if work on the project is distributed to the team members from which everybody is responsible for a part or two. This process depends on the size of work team available. If you’re working for small company where everybody does everything, the work deal is quite different as in a bigger web development company where everyone has its own role, responsibilities and works just on selected part of project.

In the first case (one for all) you are forced to be good in most web development fields (photoshop, html, css, javascript + php/sql, if necessary) but in the second case (all for one) you should be excellent in one of the fields only and familiar with others. It really depends on the posibilities you have, but my experience shows that it’s better to focus on some area and be guru in it. Yes, the best is to be guru in all, but this doesn’t work in most cases.

There are two main streams of web development

• Front-end developers also called (web) graphics designers – the role of these guys is to create graphic web design, in other words the look with layout, colors, boxes, banners, buttons and all that eye-catching stuff (themes, templates). They primarily use photoshop or flash and have at least average knowledge of HTML, CSS and basics of JavaScript.
• Back-end developers also called (web) application programmers – the role of these guys is to program the application, in most cases web application which is able to generate web pages (e.g. web engine). They primarily use programming languages, like PHP, ROR, SQL (if database is required) to code an application in itself as well as JavaScript to create libraries for web pages dynamics, later used by the first group (designers).

Regardless you’d like to be a front-end guy or back-end one, you should know where to get the basics of the web development field you want to be good in. So, here is an overview of some very usefull sources for web development beginners, in some case intermediate ones too.

Web development beginers stuff

• HTML and XHTML basics and references
• CSS Basics and CSS Mastering
• JavaScript Basics and JavaScript Mastering
• PHP Basics + Mastering and PHP Manual
• MySQL Basics + Mastering and MySQL Manual

More links of the most used tutorials and references can be found in Bookmarks, in the bottom box of the right sidebar of frontpage.

Stated above resources are those ones which I’m using (or used earlier) and thus reviewed by myself and strongly recommended to others. I would like to emphasize that this post is very brief intro to web development first steps and doesn’t cover all web development fields or web development in depth. I could write much longer, exhaustive article on this topic but I wanted to be concise and don’t get bored the readers who are looking for quick info. This informative post is appointed to absolute web development beginners to navigate them and I fully realize that advanced web developers could have individual view on some stuff. Anyway, constructive comments for web development beginners are welcome.

I hope this post helped web development novices to find the way they want to go and start somewhere. Nevertheless, this blog will continue with usefull tips for beginners as well as for those advanced ones. Stay tuned!

One Response to “Wannabe Web Developer?”

1. Emforce says:

   January 31, 2011 at 6:44 pm

   Cheers for the link to the books! will definitely look into them. I really want to branch out into web development and become a front-end developer but I don’t know what would be fully required of me yet 🙁